Home/ Questions/Q 9159827
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-17T13:35:18+00:00

I am really trying to figure this one out. How exactly is a skin

  • 0

I am really trying to figure this one out. How exactly is a skin like adobe photoshop cs6 made?

Is it just an image? Or is it graphically coded to appear like that.

The title bar works exactly like a normal title bar. It resizes, snaps minimizes and maximizes. So could it be an actual theme like aero?

I have always wondered how this works. When you see those cool STEAM and Pandora skins I wonder if it is as simple as creating the image in photoshop and then using it as a form.

How would one do this in vb.net or c#?

Edit: Another part that baffles my mind is the fact that when it is in a normal state the corners are rounded. Then when maximized they are not.

Below is an image of Photoshop cs6 if you are not familiar.

enter image description here

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    A skin like that is made by a few hundred people over a period of a year or more(including programmers, graphic artists, managers, UI designers etc), custom coding every nuance of Win32 API, ClientArea and NonClientArea, Owner-Drawn drawing, GDI+ and DirectX(on WPF), a custom display engine etc etc etc.

    Now, if you have a custom display engine, you can play with SVG to crisply scale up or down, or if you don’t have a custom display engine, use repeating 1px width images to handle image resizing on window resize.

    See Qt, which is used by Adobe engineers, maya engineers, Google earth engineers etc etc which can help you skin each and every widget on your window.

    See Delphi and its cousin C++Builder which have a different display engine on top of regular Win32 that allows skinning your application using drag+drop and configuration

    See TCL-Tk which allows you to skin your windows using simple configurations and themes.

    Also, if you’re using C#, see WPF and Expression Blend that allows you to, not just create and skin your application, but also add animations and other fancy graphics to it.

    If you like the old school approach, see http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/254/The-RGN-Generator and using Regions to code custom dialog boxes and windows and buttons etc.

    Good luck and may the graphics + programming force be with you.

    • 0